Laurayne Robinette was born in 1928 in southern Iowa. She earned her BFA from Drake University in 1952, taught art for one year in Des Moines, married, had three daughters, started taking art classes at the Des Moines Art Center, and continued her art education over the next thirty-six years.

Robinette works mostly in oil. Her representational work is taken from observations of landscapes and interiors, while the non-representational work is produced by using nontraditional methods of applying paint to canvas or paper. Waterways bridges the divide between landscape and abstraction, incorporating the textures of water and trees to knit together blocks of pure color.